He reached back and shut off the camera unit. The chirping ceased. The spinning globe went dead. “Hey!”
At first there was no response except the shushing wind, and then the two-toned whistle sounded again. He jerked toward it, his focus settling on a tree. One larger than the rest. With a night-black hollow in its base.
And—maybe?—something shifted inside. “Guys?” he said and unbelted his knife and cocked his head. “Where did you go?” He continued toward the tree, toward the hollow, until he crept inside, throated by darkness.
It’s easy to find someone who wants to work in Istanbul or Seoul or Mexico City, humping the Titan pack into mosques and along rivers and through plaza markets. But it’s nearly impossible to find someone willing and able to spend several months mountaineering in Chile or mucking through the Louisiana bayou. Michelle reached out to veterans who served in elite units, to the Sierra Club and Outward Bound programs for outdoorsy preservationists, to REI for employee sponsorship and ad revenue, and even to GoPro daredevils on YouTube.
That’s how she found Josh Wilde, a twenty-two-year-old social media influencer with more than two million followers. Unlike so many of the morons online, he didn’t post prank videos or goofball skits. His channel was called Gone Wilde, and over the past four years, he had hang glided over active volcanoes and dived shipwrecks and free-climbed El Capitan.
They met at the X Games, where GoPro was touting his latest stunt: wing-suiting off the Empire State Building and hurtling through the windowed canyons of Manhattan before landing at a sprint in Central Park.
He looked older than he was, tanned and sinewy, his skin creased from all his time outside, exposed to extreme temperatures. No tattoos, only scars. He kept his head buzzed down to a brown bristle.
At the GoPro pavilion she asked him out for a drink, and he said, “Just to be clear, I’m not going to work for you,” and she surprised herself by saying, “Then I guess we’ll have to talk about something else.”
He looked at her differently then, as if she was finally coming into focus, and she thought he was going to laugh and say he had other plans, but instead he offered her a real smile along with the time and place they should meet.
It was one of those nights that she never allowed herself. She didn’t like loud bars and she rarely drank anything but white wine, but they ended up at a crowded tiki lounge sipping ridiculous cocktails out of coconuts.
Josh looked like a raft guide who would pull you out of a hairy stretch of white water. He belonged in an REI catalog, standing on a summit he’d conquered and staring off at the horizon as if imagining what challenge he might take on next. “You’re the Captain Kirk of outdoorsmen,” she said and he said, “What?” and she said, “Nothing.”
She cleaned her glasses so many times that the cocktail napkin she was using disintegrated. She had been on five dates over the past five years—was that even what this was? a date?—and never really thought about sex except when watching shows on premium cable.
It wasn’t long before she felt the warmth of the rum buzzing her nerves and spreading to the tips of her fingers. Josh wasn’t like so many of the other men she hired. He didn’t try to show off or brag. He barely seemed aware of himself. His T-shirt had a hole in it. One of his nails was black and looked ready to fall off. He was missing a molar. He smelled like he had swiped on some deodorant but forgotten to shower. She was looking for reasons not to like him, but none of them convinced her. She talked for over an hour, in a chirpy, harried voice, about mapmaking technology before asking him, “How did you end up doing what you’re doing? Are you crazy or something?”
He laughed and shook his head and his palm made a scraping sound when he ran it across his scalp.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was a terrible question. This rum, it’s—”
“It’s all good.”
“No, forget it. I—”
“It wasn’t my idea. It was my friends’.” He motioned to the bartender then, requesting another round. His voice softened when he said, “They thought it was the best way to keep me from killing myself.”
In high school, he’d survived a car crash. His parents and sister hadn’t. They were driving the Santiam Pass in Oregon. Six inches of snow had fallen and the plows hadn’t caught up. Their Jeep slid off the road on a curve and crashed down a five-hundred-foot embankment and finally came to a rest half-sunken in a river. His father drowned. His mother was thrown from the passenger window. His sister’s arm was cloven off and she bled to death. And Josh was knocked unconscious, dangling upside down by his seat belt, with more than twenty broken bones. The snow covered up the skid marks. Two days passed before an elk hunter discovered him.
Some people said it was a miracle he had survived. Others said he was unkillable. “It’s almost like I wanted to prove them wrong.”
He started free-climbing buildings, kayaking off waterfalls, cave diving, and then his friends Todd Dartman and Lester Grimson sat him down and asked him what the hell he was doing. “The only time I felt alive was when I was nearly dead,” he told them.
It didn’t make any sense. Not to Michelle. Not even in the slightest. Roller coasters made her weep. And driving the freeway, with cars ripping in and out of the lanes, put her in a vomity panic. She hated speed, risk, chaos. But as he continued to speak, she felt herself nodding her head. And she watched—somewhat terrified—as her hand rose to his shoulder. She began to stroke, then knead the muscle there.
Josh’s friends knew they couldn’t keep him from doing what he was doing, so they were going to accompany him. Plan and manage his itinerary. Spot him. Bail him out if he got into trouble. The monetization of the whole thing came by accident, after Todd posted a video that went viral of Josh mountain biking off a ski jump.
“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. Sorry.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t apologize. Thank you so much.”
“Why are you thanking me?”
“Because—I don’t know—I’m just from the stupid suburbs.”
“What?”
“I’m like everybody else. You’re not. That’s why people like watching you. Because it’s good to be reminded that there are other ways to live. That you don’t have to sit at a desk all day and worry about your retirement savings or whatever.”
She always kept her hair in a severe ponytail and she noticed then a few stray hairs clinging to the sweat on her cheek and slipped the band off to tighten it again and he said, “Don’t,” and she said, “Don’t what?” and he said, “You look good with your hair down,” and then he reached out and combed his fingers through it and his scarred-up knuckles brushed her cheek and she whispered, “Why not?” and it wasn’t long before they were hurrying to pay the check.
It’s been over a year since that night. Maybe he doesn’t even remember her. She doesn’t have his email or phone number, and she snuck out of his hotel room before he woke up. Not because she was embarrassed or regretful. But because she wanted to preserve that happy, heated feeling and not let it be ruined by the awkwardness of saying, “So long” and acknowledging nothing could ever work out between them. Her heart was a territory that would remain unexplored.
But now her team has gone missing and not even Alaska’s 212th Rescue Squadron has been able to locate them. She needs Josh Wilde.
The sky’s reflection glimmers on the water. White collars of foam curl around boulders. Roots tangle the banks. The river’s murmur gives way to a roar where it spills over into a curiously forked waterfall.
To one side, the river drops thirty feet into a shushing boom of mist and roiling water. And to the other side, the river plummets into a gaping chasm, the entrance to an underground tunnel. This is the Devil’s Kettle, in northern Minnesota.
Todd Dartman balances on the rocks here. He is the kind of guy who incorrectly quotes passages from On the Road. Bleach-haired, soul-patched, potbellied. He wears a hemp necklace and a Phish T-shirt, and h
as hazy memories of every youth hostel in Europe.
He’s geared out with electronics. A Bluetooth headset. And a shoulder-mounted GoPro camera that’s currently live-streaming. A climbing rope and harness anchor him to the shore. He is the voice of Gone Wilde, and he says, “All right, friends and brethren. We’re about five minutes out from our latest stunt. Hope you’re hungry for a triple cheeseburger of terror, adrenaline, and life-threatening awesomeness.” He stutters his feet to the edge and peers down into the kettle. “You see that? Looks like certain death to me. A river to nowhere.”
Then another voice crackles over the Bluetooth. Lester. “You ready to do something stupid?” he says.
“Always!” Todd says. “We’re good to go on this end. You in position?”
Lester is. About a mile from shore, on the blue calm of Lake Superior, a boat drops anchor, the metal weight cutting through the water. He waits for the line to go slack as the anchor clanks the rocky bottom. He wears cargo shorts and a collared shirt with many pockets. He styles his hair in a black puff, a kind of helmet that he can stick a pen or pencil into. He, too, is live-streaming from a camera unit vised to the dashboard of the bowrider.
The deck is cluttered with recording equipment, a first aid kit, a heart defibrillator, a cooler, snorkel gear. Right now Lester is consulting his GPS feed, a green-screened tablet that lists his coordinates. “I’m anchored over the tunnel system’s spout. All goes well, he should spring up nearby. If all goes well.”
Todd says, “Four miles of underground tunnels blasting ice-cold water along at forty miles an hour. What could go wrong?”
Lester’s face pinches with worry. “Everything.”
He hears a noise then. The whump-whump-whump of an approaching helicopter. He makes his hand into a visor. “Chopper’s rolling in. Might be we’re about to get busted.”
“More drama means more coverage,” Todd says. “More coverage means more subscribers means more ad dollars.”
“Yeah, well,” Lester says. “Let’s just hope we’re not making a snuff video. Our boy Josh has used up his nine lives at this point.”
Upriver from the Devil’s Kettle, Josh roams the banks, collecting rocks to puzzle together into a cairn. It’s already waist-high. Lichen-crusted and mud-slimed. Gapped with shadows. This is his ritual before every stunt. He is about to dive into the void and dare the underwater tunnel system that veins its way into Lake Superior.
His helmet camera is powered off and waiting on the bank. This moment belongs to him alone. He is bare-chested, the dry suit peeled to his waist. He adds another rock, then another. It’s a little like digging his own grave. Makes him realize what’s at risk. Reminds him there’s still time to back out, and more and more, he’s eager to back out. At first what he was doing felt like some sort of atonement. Now it just feels stupid. But he and his friends have built this … thing together. Whatever it is. A business? A micro media empire? Somehow a bunch of dumbass high school graduates are pulling in mid–six figures a year off ad revenue from GoPro, Clif Bar, and Patagonia, among other brands. Initially this was supposed to be for Josh, but it increasingly it feels like it’s for them.
His friends call him a warrior poet. They have misinterpreted his emptiness for depth. Vacant is how he feels most of the time. Hollow. Carved out. Sure, he’ll throw up his pinky and index fingers in the shape of the devil’s horns and say something for the camera, like: “Let’s own this mountain,” or “Ride the razor’s edge,” or whatever bullshit. But it’s all an act. He doesn’t give two damns.
His body is crosshatched with scars, but there’s one that stands out from the rest. A thick, gummy line that runs from his collarbone to his hip. It came from the car wreck and the surgery that followed. A daily reminder that he lived and his family didn’t. If he dug into it with a knife, nothing would dribble out of him but stale air and shadows. He would simply deflate.
So many people told Josh he must have lived for a reason. He must have some purpose to fulfill before death could finally claim him. They were wrong. He performs stunts that people watch on their phones while waiting for the bus or taking a shit. His life is meaningless, and yet everyone treats him like he’s something special.
Todd hollers his way, indicating it’s go time, and Josh lifts a hand to acknowledge him before adding one last agate—a milky yellow nugget—to the top of the cairn. Then he sockets his arms into the sleeves of his dry suit and slowly zips the chest shut. For the kettle run, Lester built him custom-made aquatic shoes that give him the appearance of having long, webbed toes. And a custom oxygen tank—heavily padded and smaller than a standard scuba—that Josh shoulders now before splashing his way downstream.
Todd trains the camera on Josh and throws up a celebratory fist and speaks in a fight announcer’s voice. “Here comes the man of the hour! He wing-suited off the Empire State Building, he free-climbed El Capitan, he hang glided over the lava-spewing belly of Mount Kilauea. Josh motherfucking Wilde!”
This is Josh’s cue. He’s supposed to say something badass, something they can print on coffee mugs and T-shirts and sell off the website. But all he can manage is a smile.
So Todd talks for him. “Never feel so jacked up as when you tease death, am I right? Wag your tongue in the reaper’s face? Josh?”
In response Josh pulls on his mask. Then fits on the helmet with the camera and high-powered LED lamp attached to it.
“Josh?” Todd slaps him on the shoulder. “You ready to dare the nightmare, bro?”
Josh hops up and down, shakes out his arms, cracks his neck. Then he looks long and hard at Todd. “I think this is it,” he says.
“Dude, you’ll be fine. You’re always fine.”
“No,” Josh says. “I mean … I think I’m done? I think I’m ready to not do this anymore.”
Todd’s voice reveals that he might be not only confused, but also hurt. “But … what? Why?”
Josh tucks in his mouthpiece. Heaves a fat dose of oxygen. And jumps into nothingness. The whitewater seizes him and drags him down into the underworld.
For a few seconds he sees nothing, lost in the black nowhere of an underground channel. He hears the burbling rush and hiss of water. He feels the current shoving him along. And then, in flashes, the tunnel comes into focus and he finds his bearings. This is the world’s deadliest waterslide, and he’s blasting through it like a bullet down a gun barrel.
Millions of tons of rock surround him. He could be a mile or more beneath the ground. This is an unrecoverable, unimaginable place. No one can save him if something goes wrong—and that recognition makes him feel suddenly alive. It’s a rarer and rarer sensation. He’s mostly lost his capacity for awe. But now, as if a button has been pushed, every nerve in his body lights up like a circuit board. He lets out a whoop of delight, muffled by his regulator.
Against a sharp turn in the tunnel he clangs and loses his breath. He barely recovers before wheeling around and striking the opposite wall so hard that little galaxies of light spin through his vision. In a wrenching second, he comes to a painful stop.
At first it appears—in the glow of his lamplight—to be a tangle of branches that blocks his passage. But as he readjusts himself, he sees it’s a deer. A dead buck with a wide rack of antlers. Its rotten face stares back at him with bone whitening through the flesh. Like something demonic, elemental.
Josh startles, and recovers from his fright, but he can’t get loose, the straps for the oxygen tank caught up in the horns. The water drags hard at him. As if he were a salmon struggling at the end of a hooked line. The deer’s carcass flops against his, the antlers prodding him.
He tries to unclip his tank. And can’t. For a moment, he considers giving up. Wouldn’t that be a relief? To end? Fifteen minutes ago that might have been the case, but right now he’s never been so happily, painfully alive. So he reaches for a belt knife. Snicks the blade through a strap. As it severs, his body flops painfully sideways, still caught in the current.
H
e slashes the other strap—and away he swirls. His mouthpiece rips away with the tank and he’s thrown down the tunnel with one last gulp of air to sustain him.
The boat rocks when Lester hurries from starboard to port and back again, saying, “Shit, shit, shit.” He peers into the bright blue water, hunting for bubbles, some blurred movement, anything. “Should have come up by now.”
Over the headset, Todd says, “You do this every time, Lester. Just chill. Stop being such a mom. Our boy’ll be fine.”
Thirty yards away, the helicopter lowers its pontoons to the water. The engine powers down.
“What about now?” Todd says. “Now is when I would maybe start to feel worried.”
“Still nothing. He’s a minute past now. He could be caught up in the tunnel or knocked out right beneath the boat for all I know. Can’t see for shit because of the rotor wash coming off the chopper. I’m going in.”
With that Lester rips off his earpiece, kicks off his shoes, and pulls on a snorkel and mask. Just as he swings his leg over the rail, some bubbles bother the surface of the lake.
Right then, with a sucking gasp of air, Josh breaches the surface. Closer to the chopper than the boat. He leans back and breathes greedily and gives Lester a tired wave. “I’m,” Josh says, “here.”
“You’re crazy,” Lester says. “You’re a crazy bastard!”
Josh is the face of their operation. And the balls. Todd is their mascot, narrator, and cheerleader. And Lester? He’s the guy at the desk. He produces and edits the videos, manages their finances, plots their trips, and engineers any specialized gear for the stunts. He doesn’t take risks. He doesn’t even particularly like to exercise. But there’s something about working with Josh that jacks up his pulse and makes him feel a vicarious thrill. It’s the equivalent of playing video games or watching movies—which he allots a lot of time to—except that he’s truly complicit in the adventure, and if he doesn’t take the necessary precautions, the hero could actually die.
Suicide Woods Page 13
